Month: July 2017

I’ve owned this domain name for about 10 years and have done very little with it. I was about to just give it up, but I thought I would make a final attempt at creating something with this space. I’ve done blogs before and while not very interesting it was nice to have an outlet for some ideas or just simply sharing some events and memories. I could easily keep updating those old blogs, but I figured I might as well do something with this domain. I will mainly try to use this space for creative projects and post some thoughts in between, I don’t expect to have a huge readership or anything like that – I do expect to better myself through this. I’ve read time and time again that the way we improve is just by doing, and the only way to start doing is simply that – start.

Here are some things I’d like to improve on and hopefully this new blog will help:

writing in general

music and songwriting

grasping economic concepts

understanding government policies

marketing and communications

other creative outlets – graphics, video, photography

I understand that’s quite a diverse range of topics, but hey I’m a complicated guy. I think this blog will help me in all these topics by giving me a place to just sit down and think and share about this topics and what i’m learning. I expect if I am able to continually write here then the posts will become increasingly more interesting as I improve. With this in mind I’ve decided on a tagline for this site, at least for now. It will be a reminder that I need to practice, perform or post often in order to improve. It will be a reminder to : BE BETTER

I’ll be completely honest, this isn’t the first time I’ve thought about this relaunch, in fact on a separate tab on my writing app I have a post I wrote a little over a year ago. That post has a very similar tone but it was also written closer to the beginning of the year so it also counts as a new year’s resolution post. I’m tempted to copy it to the bottom of this post, but I feel like it’d be too much of a disconnect. Maybe I’ll post it later on if it seems to be appropriate.

I’d like to end this relaunch post by sharing some of the inspirations behind this renewal, or this motivation to be better. Like I said this idea has been generating for over a year now, so there are lots of little inspirations here and there that I’ve come across. I’ll just mention a couple.

Tim Ferriss – Tools of Titans. I’m currently reading this book. I’ve followed Tim Ferriss’ blog and podcasts for several years now. I enjoy his constant quest to better himself. This latest book takes all the ideas he’s gathered from most of his interviews and bundles them together in this book form. Its a very easy to read book, albeit a long one. It’s also very easy to learn from a book like this. I’m sure I’ll be referencing this book or sections of it in future posts.

John Saddington – I used to follow John Saddington when he was writing about church communications close to decade ago. He moved on to do something different and I lost touch with his activities. When thinking about this relaunch I looked him up because I wanted to see if he mentioned good wordpress hosting sites. I remembered he had designed a few WP themes and thought he might have a blog post on hosting or something. I gave up that search right away because the first thing I came across was the fact that John had started reading Tools of Titans (the book mentioned above) and had just started a daily vlog where he discussed the chapter he had read that day. I watched his current post and decided I wanted to follow along with him. Like I mentioned above I followed Tim’s blog and podcast so I didn’t feel the urgent need to read this book, I figured I would eventually. John’s vlog caused me to pick up the book right away and catch up to where he was. I’m so glad I did. Besides the book John is also showing what his life is like as he leads a startup in San Francisco. He’s always been of the mindset that you need to be creating (blog, vlog, journal) in order to improve and again just start doing it.

A couple of music documentaries that go deep into explaining how the music is created. I really enjoy seeing what goes into creating all these songs and the experiences that shape those lyrics. There are a few that I will mention in a later post but the series that best captures this idea in my opinion is Sonic Highways by the Foo Fighters. I’ve watched these multiple times, in fact the series has become my go to in flight entertainment when traveling. These documentaries really encompass several of the areas that I want to work on: music, storytelling, video, graphics. They really make me want to get out and create something.

Lastly some personal inspirations – I’m currently surrounded by friends and family who are out there doing. Taking on new challenges, new roles, moving cross country to start a business, inspiring others through health and fitness, and healthy eating, sharing recipes, sharing workouts, giving up long careers to start something new, putting in long hours into their dream jobs. These are all inspirations for me to step up and do something challenging, to make something new, to be better.